There’s no chance the Senate will approve a minimum wage bill that includes an adjustment for inflation, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk said Tuesday. If the House insists on inflation indexing, the bill is dead for this session, he added.

Bakk’s comments overshadowed the day’s action in the conference committee, where three House members and three senators met again to try to negotiate a compromise between the bills passed last session in each chamber. They broke without reaching agreement but said they were likely to meet again Wednesday.

Upstairs from the Capitol committee room, where senators had said the inflation issue could be up for discussion, Bakk made it clear to reporters outside his office that there was no chance.

“The Senate is not going to do inflation. Period,” he said. He could support it personally, but “there are more than 10 in my caucus that have said there are no circumstances under which they’re going to vote for inflation. So as long as the House is hung up on inflation, it’s not going to get wrapped up. And the Speaker knows that.”

Bakk, a DFLer from Cook, predicted that House Speaker Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, will ultimately give up the inflation provision. “He’ll back off of it, because he has to, because he’ll want a bill.”

After the meeting, Thissen said the House wants some kind of inflator in the bill but will consider alternatives to its current proposal, which would increase the minimum wage each year by the consumer price index or 2.5 percent, whichever is lower.

He said he believes there would be an alternative that would garner enough Senate support.

“We haven’t polled the idea of something other than CPI,” Bakk acknowledged, but he said he’s confident “it’s not going to happen.”

Thissen said that he doesn’t like ultimatums and that the conference committee should be allowed to do the work of negotiating.

He also said that if the Senate doesn’t want to pass a minimum wage bill this year, they should just be honest about that “instead of playing games.”

State Rep. Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, who is leading the three-member House negotiating team, said after Tuesday’s meeting that as far as he’s concerned, inflation is still on the table.

The conference committee meeting started with the two sides essentially locked in the same positions that divided them Monday night.

The House offered to accept the Senate plan to implement the $9.50 wage by 2016 instead of 2015, but included a proviso that inflation indexing would begin in 2017.

Sen. Jeff Hayden, DFL-Minneapolis, said there was not enough support in the Senate for indexing and again urged a vote on the $9.50 wage.

Winkler again said House members needed some sort of signal about the Senate’s intentions with respect to other portions of the bill before they could vote on the wage piece.

After the recess, the Senate presented an offer that included the $9.50 by 2016 for large employers, with no inflation adjustment. It also laid out wage rates for small businesses and young employees.

The House didn’t vote on the proposal but said it intended to work up a counter proposal for Wednesday.

The panel, made up of three DFLers from the House and three from the Senate, is charged with coming up with a compromise between the House and Senate bills passed last session. That compromise would be submitted for up-or-down floor votes in both chambers, both of which have Democratic majorities.

The House bill passed last session includes a $9.50 minimum wage by 2015, with inflation adjustment starting in 2016. The Senate’s bill capped the minimum wage at $7.75, with no inflation escalator.

Supporters of the inflation provision say it’s needed to protect the wage’s purchasing power, while opponents object to the additional cost and loss of lawmaker control.

Legislative leaders had touted minimum wage as an issue that could get done early in the session, but the intraparty disagreement seems to be bogging it down.

Bakk was clearly still smarting Tuesday from the House members’ vote Monday turning down the Senate’s offer.

“It was a lot of work to get my members to $9.50, I can tell you, and we got no credit at all. We just got dismissed. So I guess maybe we have to be a little clearer with them: Inflation’s not going to happen. There won’t be a bill.”

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